If we were about to develop the thesis about the marginal position of painting today, paintings by Ivan Skvrce, as well as those by his colleagues with whom he repeatedly exhibited, could serve as ideal examples: lazy choice of motif, its meticulous, almost manic transcription into visual layout whose meaning is exhausted in the effort of connecting to its own reference and more often than not its banal title, which additionally degrades the symbolic status of the painting – all this more than clearly indicates to the fact that painting today is just a problematic residuum of the past that in the perspective of infinite present does not know what to do about itself.
Of course, such interpretation is more likely a reflection of insistence on discourse that could confirm the historical singularity of its medium, than the reflection of real inferiority of painting in contemporary artistic production. However, the dubiousness of painting, if it exists, is not conditioned by the rise of the other, more economic media (like photography, video, etc.), but by the fact that the discourse of medium’s autonomy is simply does not count any more. Painting “as such” does not exist. What exists in today’s situation of radical pluralism is a painting practice that is more or less competitive within the myriad of other, equally valuable artistic forms that without the possibility to function as autonomous and self-sufficient artistic phenomena readily calculate upon the interests of the market, politics, ideology, fashion, trends and life styles, entertainment industry, discourse or media intervention… by such manoeuvres safeguarding their own survival. Here the role of painting is not by any chance inferior, but on the contrary quite representative – we can find it out every now and then when one of above mention factors launches it into the orbit of networked interests. The fact that even the triumphal revival of painting that occurred in the Eighties is not possible to explain as an outcome of its logic evolution, but as confirmation of its treacherous survival, made possible by the narration about the end of history, is reason enough for evasion of any historic interpretation of its subsequent recessive phases. Simply, marginality is not about the history any more, but about the market. So far as painting in the posthistoric times is concerned, it is utterly uncertain when its shares’ value is going to increase.
Ivan Skvrce’s commitment to marginality is not, hence, by any means historically necessary or self-explanatory, just as it is not an outcome or reflection of the marginal position of the painting today. The connection between the marginal outlook that his painting embodies and painting medium is accidental and, if we would go all the way, there is really nothing that might give us the right to assert that what Skvrce is creating is really painting. If it is, his conscious decision to take the position at margin is a sign of his desire to survive and not a symptom of extinction, it is a sign of his competitiveness rather than marginalisation or his communicativeness rather than media isolation. Over the topos of marginalisation painting is integrating into the contemporary art discourse, thus affecting some problems and aspects that it shares with other artistic forms or artistic practice in the whole.
The outlook from the margin belongs to the one who desires something. If we resort to the psychoanalytic discourse, the position at the margin or edge, that is the implicit look askance, is the position of a subject who desires his or hers lost object. The object of desire, namely, does not exist for the objective, concentrated, indifferent look, but only for the twisted gaze, distorted in the perspective of longing and directed by the desire. The paintings by Ivan Skvrce can thus be perceived as certain anamorphosis or distortion of the object shifted by the outlook perspective. This, of course, is not about geometric or gestalt, but ontological shift in perspective. Ivan Skvrce’s object cannot be perceived by sight or mental induction, it only gets its name and shape if seen from the subjective, interested, by individual desire directed, not to say psychotic, perspective. Which shape? What does Ivan Skvrce’s object want to “see”?
It is possible to interpret the mentioned relationship of anamorphosis in two ways. If motif is a starting point, than choice of the (photographs of) manholes could seem deliberate or not completely accidental. While the incidental character of Skvrce’s previous motives was evident, now the motif by itself actually has a fetish character. Manholes, namely, are not banal objects, since primarily they are not objects, but signs. The manholes that Skvrce is painting are unmistakably labelled: fire, sanitary, electric, etc., but the named content is absent in the sign itself. Manholes cover holes in the sidewalk, these holes hide something and, regardless of what is claimed to be hidden, it is not trustworthy. The manholes are undoubtedly mysterious objects. The ideal metaphors of desire at the starting point. They are elusive, it is only possible to get around them, just as Ivan Skvrce does, demonstrating the difficulty and uncertainty of their painting objectivisation by the relative complexity of “painting” procedure. The photography of the motif is firstly projected on the canvas surface, which was previously divided in a grid in order to ease the transfer of the projection. The projection is caught in the grid just as the projected forms are delineated leaving on the canvas a linear scheme of the motif, which is subsequently filled with paint. The paint is squeezed out of the tube directly onto the canvas, rejecting the rhetoric power of painting gesture (that is, the authenticity of subjective transposition of the referential motif it implicitly includes). The motif is approached indirectly, in defeatist manner: the grid, drawing and paint cruise around it from far away; its fictional forming is graduate, it is slowly sublimated into the fetish object; the object of desire does not exist in the reality, it is always a fictional creation. The relatively complex painting action is, therefore, a pure materialisation of the desire to recognise banal communal manholes as objects of mystery.
It is, however, possible to read the anamorphosis reversely, starting from the described painting action. Visual happenings on Ivan Skvrce’s paintings are, namely, exhausted in the more or less successful attempts to embody the motif. However, it is difficult to perceive what is left of it as a style or aesthetic quality of the painting itself: the configuration of soft accumulations of paint in coy colours, unmoved by gesture of the hand that floats in the background vacuum, are rather mere remains of predication than autonomous value of the painting character. Out of representation or denote function, the visual facts fall into the connotation vacuum, the semantic worm-hole where they float without a real name, waiting to be recycled in the world of life beyond or after the painting rhetoric. Maybe it could be said that led by the desire to become paintings of a chosen motif, anamorphous paintings by Ivan Skvrce recognise the desire to become the painting practice itself in the situation in which the painting practice as “itself” does not exist. That is – and we can widen the diagnosis to the art in general – it exists at the level of pure desire as fictitious reality of a twisted gaze. Of course, the thesis defining the real form of Skvrce’s paintings as painting has no safe foundations. It is only safe to say that this form is disclosed only to a partial gaze.
Ivana Mance
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Five paintings / Electric, Sanitary, Fire, Szege84 ontode, No title/ oil on canvas; dimensions 123 x 148 cm; all 2005.; without signature
5 diary photographs, 9 × 13 cm, made from autumn 2002. till autumn 2003. / leica format, Minolta XE5/.
Ivan Škvrce – born 1980 in Dubrovnik
Graduated from the Academy of Visual Arts in Zagreb in the class of professor Igor Rončević. He has participated in the student exchange program in USA, at the Indiana University of Pensilvania, Art Department. Lives and works in Zagreb and Dubrovnik
Contact:
skvrce@yahoo.com
